Semantic News Community Group

The Semantic News Community Group is a forum for exploring the intersection of W3C semantic technologies and news gathering, production, distribution and consumption.
It will focus on a common representation for abstract ideas in the news domain such as a 'news event' or a domain ontology for news. This includes the following subject areas:
1. Review, test and comment on existing and proposed standards for semantic technologies in the news domain.
2. Encourage the reuse of well-known datasets and ontologies and propose mappings between them as required.
3. Best practices for publishing, exchanging and linking data, including use cases.
4. Development of prototypes to help build the business case for this approach.
5. Discuss design principles of schemas and ontologies.

Note: Community Groups are proposed and run by the community. Although W3C hosts these conversations, the groups do not necessarily represent the views of the W3C Membership or staff.

As the IPTC gets ready to discuss potential changes or additions to rNews, we want to give those of you who are not members of the IPTC the chance to participate — just as we’ve done leading up to the initial release.

What’s missing? What’s wrong or requires discussion?

Let us know your thoughts, let’s talk about them and you might end up helping us make rNews 1.1 better than it otherwise would be…

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.”

-Albert Camus

Or rephrased according to the group remit, should semantic news exist? You’re a member of this group so I assume you would say yes.

But, there needs to be a point or purpose, otherwise why bother. To say it another way, there needs to be a need. Something that has been lacking in previous pushes for the semantic web and possibly a reason for its lack of reach compared with the human-readable web.

Shall we start off this group with a round of introductions? My introduction and my company’s is below. Feel free to respond by adding your own.

My name is Jarred McGinnis. I work for the Press Association, which among other things is the wire service for the UK and Ireland.

In order to address the growing demand for ‘fast, fair and accurate’ content and data, the Press Association recently committed to a large-scale project to redesign its IT infrastructure by putting semantic web technologies and principles at its core. By the adoption of established standards such as IPTC’s G2, RDF, a preference for existing ontologies such as geonames, FOAF, Dublin Core, etc. and the use of technologies such as cloud-based computing, open and RESTful approaches, XML-driven dBs and triple stores, the Press Association addresses real business needs such as, the managing of enormous, disparate and heterogeneous sets of data, reducing silos and streamlining content and data interchange within the organisation and between PA and its customers. Can you tell I snatched that blurb from a presentation abstract?